The following description of the background of the present technology is provided simply as an aid in understanding the present technology and is not admitted to describe or constitute prior art to the present technology.
Model phages have been engineered using molecular biology techniques to deliver heterologous protein products to bacterial cells. E.g., US 2009/0155215; M. J. Loessner et. al., Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 1133-40 (1996)). The natural host range of model phage engineered to date is limited. Methods for creating variations in phage genomes and engineering new phage genomes may lead to the identification of phages with varied properties (e.g., varied host ranges) that are useful for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.
Engineering diverse phage is generally made more difficult by the properties of phage genomes. For example, phage genomes have relatively few restriction sites and are heavily modified, making use of traditional cloning techniques with phage challenging. Phages also have compact genomes with very little non-coding DNA, which can make it challenging to find sites within the genome that are compatible with traditional engineering. Many existing phage engineering technologies that rely on in vitro strategies are generally inefficient and challenging to scale up. Further, engineering phages within bacteria can be problematic due to toxicity of phages to bacteria as well as the difficulty in maintaining the stability of large engineered genomes.